Critical Perspective on SITI Company's Radio Macbeth by Michael Thomas Taylor

Macbeth plays in the hinterlands called Scotland, beyond the borders of English civilization. Radio Macbeth, so the program notes tell us, plays in the “guts of an abandoned theatre,” as a group of actors rehearses for a radio broadcast of Shakespeare’s play. But in neither world are the boundaries between center and periphery as clear as they might seem. From the witches with which Shakespeare’s play opens, Macbeth’s Scotland is a realm governed by sorcery and violence, and above all by fear; in which the line between the natural and the supernatural, the living and the dead, has come under siege as Macbeth and his Lady invoke the darkness and eschew the day. And if the conceit of the Radio broadcast in this new production seems to fade into a subtext as the rehearsal gets underway, it nevertheless continues, like Scotland, to define the scene of the play. As the audience will doubtless know if they have read even one review of Radio Macbeth, this is a production about sound and the power of sound to set the stage. But it is also a play about the transposition of this medium—the worlds it can conjure up and the boundaries it can cross—onto a more modern stage.

A reliance on sound is not so far from Shakespeare, who wrote for a theater in which afternoon performances meant that darkness, the color of this play, could only be had in the imagination; and it is an obvious twist on a work famous for the tolling of its bells and the knocking at its gates. But this continuity from Shakespeare to Orson Welles, whose 1936 “Voodoo Macbeth,” set in Haiti and played with an all-black cast looms behind Radio Macbeth, haunts this production even as the designers make full use of more modern theatrical means such as light and shadow. Sound and sight do not compete, but they are also not equals. Indeed, the radio-frame begins offstage, as the actors arrive and loudly fumble their way toward finding the lights; but only as they enter does the theatre go dark, hiding the actor who will play Macbeth, and who has been silently inhabiting the stage as the audience comes in. The retreat from this well-worn device (some might say worn-out cliché) of contemporary theatre to an earlier setting is obvious and intentional. It is also a retreat into a world of stage-craft in which the spooky, even kooky effects of Radio theatre, can be employed with the brazen confidence of a Halloween ghost-pageant. Witches cackle and winds blow and we will not leave without a blood-curdling scream of murder! The clear artistry of Radio Macbeth is to bring about these effects simply and fundamentally, with voices and objects on stage; just as the actors’ basic physical vocabulary allows them to effortlessly increase the pace or redraw the center of action. But it is the constant modulations in sound, the playful fashioning of Shakespeare’s lines, the trading of roles back and forth among the cast, that carries through the shifting scenes and the shadows on the wall. Indifferent to light and darkness, sound fills outs distinctions of center and periphery, just as radio is a medium that is both everywhere and nowhere.

Hence if sound does not so much establish boundaries as pass around and through them, it does place several things squarely in the center of this performance: the actors’ voices and Shakespeare’s text. To say that Shakespeare’s text lies at the center of things is no empty or idle observation. It reflects a Shakespeare bent, ironically enough, away from centuries of concern about historical chronicles, Scottish costumes, and the great question of Macbeth’s character, to a post-modern sensibility. The overwhelming weight of the soliloquies, of the murderers’ open calls to darkness, have always threatened to tip the play into comic farce. In Radio Macbeth, they have found an apt medium. We always and literally see on stage the split between the grand ambitions of these illusions, amplified and reverberating through the theatre (and in broadcast, into the world), and the script from which they are read. But what does this make of the text? In her program notes, Anne Bogart, who co-directed the play together with the prolific sound designer Darren West, writes that the actors “cling to the sanity of words while the chaos of history grows to be undeniably present with them in the room.” What, one wonders, could be sane about this text? We need no literary scholars to tell us that witches speak in riddles, that ambition blinds Macbeth to dangerous ambiguity, that words shamelessly lie under the thin cloak of irony. Perhaps the sanity resides, nevertheless, in the blunt force of language, in Shakespeare’s poetic surety, swiftness, and precision? Or in the sharp blows of comic relief that connect with the audience? Or, as Bogart seems to suggest, in the ritual of coming together around the play, in the very power of theatre to share and shift roles and voices? However one answers this question, it articulates the most pressing risk of SITI’s Radio Macbeth: an unyielding decision to stage Shakespeare in a way that avant-garde theatre has today largely abandoned, to display a deliberate trust in the tradition of its text as capable of “exorcising” its ghosts.

Michael Thomas Taylor, Assistant Professor, University of Calgary